The flickering gaslight cast long, dancing shadows across the room, highlighting the dust motes swirling in the stale air. A chill, deeper than the autumn night outside, settled on my skin. My head throbbed, a dull, persistent ache that mirrored the unsettling emptiness inside me. He was there, of course, always there. His hand, calloused but gentle, rested on mine. "Feeling better, my love?" he'd ask, his voice a low rumble that sent shivers down my spine, shivers that weren't entirely unpleasant.
I didn't know his name. I didn't know anything. Fragments of memory – a blinding flash of light, the screech of metal, a face blurred by pain – haunted the edges of my consciousness, but they remained stubbornly out of reach. He filled the void, patiently piecing together a life for me, a life that felt both familiar and utterly foreign. He told me stories of our life together, of our love, of our shared dreams. His words were soothing, yet they left me with a nagging sense of unease, a feeling that something was terribly wrong.
The nightmares started then. They weren't vivid, not at first. Just fleeting images: a shadowy figure, a glint of steel, a scream swallowed by the darkness. But they grew more intense, more real, until I woke drenched in sweat, gasping for breath, the phantom touch of cold metal still clinging to my skin. I'd wake to find him beside me, his face etched with concern, his eyes filled with a possessive love that bordered on obsession.
One night, amidst the swirling chaos of a particularly vivid nightmare, a name surfaced – Daniel. It felt important, vital, yet the connection eluded me. I asked him about Daniel, but his response was evasive, a flicker of something dark crossing his features. He changed the subject, his touch lingering a little too long on my arm. His smile didn't reach his eyes.
Then came the whispers. Faint at first, like the rustling of leaves in a graveyard, they grew louder, more insistent. They spoke of betrayal, of revenge, of a life stolen. They spoke of him. They spoke of Daniel's killer.
One rainy afternoon, while sorting through old photographs, a picture caught my eye. A younger, happier me, laughing, my arm around a man with kind eyes and a warm smile. The name Daniel sprang to mind, clear and sharp, a searing pain accompanying its arrival. The man in the photograph wasn't the man beside me. The realization hit me with the force of a physical blow. The man who called himself my husband, who claimed to love me, was the one who had killed Daniel.
His face, once a source of comfort, now twisted into a mask of fury. He cornered me, his voice a venomous hiss. "I wish you had never remembered all of those… all of those things," he choked out, his eyes blazing with a possessive rage that chilled me to the bone. The love in his eyes was gone, replaced by something monstrous, something that craved possession, something that would stop at nothing to keep me his, forever. The shadows danced, and I knew, with a terrifying certainty, that my nightmare had only just begun.